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Welcome to Superoceras, a blog about science and natural history, slightly biased towards paleontology and zoology, but inclusive of all sciences. Started in October of 2009, my goal is to communicate scientific knowledge (and the occasional piece of nonsense) in an informative and entertaining manner. Feel free to contact me with questions, comments, concerns, or criticism at superoceras(at)gmail(dot)com, and follow me on Twitter @Superoceras for all that and more in 140 characters or less!

Thursday, December 02, 2010

... and such a let down.

2:00PM EST. I've been waiting all day for this. Whatever the news, I want to hear it. So I click the link. The link that NASA has been teasing me with all week. The page opens, the NASA TV video player appears and then...

...nothing.

Nothing at all.

I try the link in three different browsers. Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Internet Explorer all offer the same result. No video.

I click the "Other Viewing Options" tab, and try them all. I think I'm getting closer to seeing the conference as QuickTime is "negotiating" with NASA. But still, nothing.

Even the NASA app on my iPhone, the one that NASA released, that has a NASA TV section on it, tells me it can't retrieve the current NASA TV schedule.

Now I knew they weren't going to tell me that the found life on another world or anything. But I waited until 2:00PM to take my lunch break so I wouldn't miss the coverage regardless. Maybe the press release they put out built up so much interest that everyone was going online at the same time, preventing us all from seeing the video feed. But considering the hype they helped create, you'd think NASA would have been ready to get their servers slammed.

As indicated by the title of the post, I'm severely let down. It's now 2:30PM, and I'll be going back to work. Here is the featured article that NASA put up. You can read about the discovery there. Just don't bother clicking the link to watch the live press conference.

Sorry for the rant. I'll write about the Science paper once I can get my hands on it, and without any sensationalist buildup, discuss the implications of the research it presents. I guess all the sciences are plagued with the same media disease. Here I was thinking paleontology just got picked on all the time.

4 comments:

  1. Same problem here - lunch break and everything! I assumed it was my crappy work computer. Anyway, I really enjoyed the Ed Yong and Carl Zimmer posts on the story.

    http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/12/02/mono-lake-bacteria-build-their-dna-using-arsenic-and-no-this-isnt-about-aliens/

    and

    http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2010/12/02/of-arsenic-and-aliens/

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  2. Yeah. A little disappointed by NASA, and the hype, but liked both of their posts, as well as one on Pharyngula.
    http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/12/its_not_an_arsenic-based_life.php

    What I did not like was this Purell commercial I saw, which is ridiculous in itself, aside from the fact that they have no idea what the NASA press conference was about at all.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddn3hUKxEsg&feature=player_embedded

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  3. Very cool news tho. Let me know if you need the paper... or some good mono lake pics :-)

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  4. Check out what Carl Zimmer (and others) had to say about it:

    http://www.slate.com/id/2276919

    ReplyDelete